DATA SHEET

InMage vContinuum Simpli!ed and Replication for Virtual Environments

TM t Backup quickly, reliably and Based on the industry-leading continuous data protection (CDP) , vContinuum provides a uni!ed solution for backup and disaster recovery (DR) of VMware ESX/vSphere virtual machine continuously with absolutely NO (VM) environments. Its simple wizard based graphical user interface (GUI) o"ers a convenient way backup windows to perform application aware protection and recovery at the VM level. It automates VM discovery, creation of protection policies, operational recovery scenarios and performs true push-button t Accomplish push button failover to failover and failback operations, thereby meeting stringent recovery time objectives (RTO) for remote sites with near zero data loss mission critical VMs and applications. InMage vContinuum’s block-level asynchronous replication for disaster recovery and host-o#oad architecture is designed for near zero impact on production VMs and to provide scalability for mid-tier and enterprise virtual environments. Built-in compression and WAN t Leverage scalable host o"-load acceleration over cost e"ective IP networks allow users to maintain strict recovery point objectives architecture with very low I/O impact (RPO), while reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO). Further, InMage vContinuum does not depend on any underlying hardware and storage features to accomplish this. It can extend on production VMs backup and DR solutions to physical servers through a seamless upgrade to InMage Scout, thus t Enable instantaneous application o"ering a consistent approach to protect, manage and recover virtual and physical environments.

consistent and granular recoveries Production VMs to meet stringent recovery time objectives vContinuum Server t Minimize target storage Remote target VMs requirements through sparse vSphere Server retention and capacity optimizations LAN WAN

vContinuum Local target VMs Target t Achieve a simple and consistent approach to protect virtual and vSphere Server vContinuum physical environments Target Data and/or application recovery at remote site

vSphere Server

Data and/or application recovery at local site InMage data tap Figure 1. Overview of InMage vContinuum architecture for a uni!ed approach to backup and replication. Challenges with Current Products and Technologies On one end of the spectrum, there are several products that perform daily incremental and weekly full . This approach is typically resource and I/O intensive on the guest VMs. These products are based on traditional backup methods making target storage requirements are higher, and end users still encounter problems with backup windows encroaching into business hours on production VMs. In some cases di"erent products from the same or di"erent vendors have to be utilized in order to perform backup and replication and even then, these two tasks cannot be performed simultaneously. On the other hand, users can automate site wide failover using array based replication that has been quali!ed to work with VMware site recovery manager (SRM). Although a seemingly elegant solution, this can be an expensive endeavor due to the array based replication requirements. Additionally this is only possible within a very narrow set of storage platforms. This imposes undesirable restrictions including potentially migrating production to supported platforms, and foregoing cost optimizations in the storage disks and newly added disks of an already redundancy and reduce target storage hardware used for your secondary site. In protected VM. Additionally, the o#ine sync requirements. However, depending on the addition, the protection and recovery options feature enables bandwidth constrained production data, target storage utilization are not granular. You can only protect entire environments to synchronize the VM disks still increases linearly over time. InMage datastores instead of individual VMs, and have to removable storage at a primary site vContinuum provides a novel form of capacity to make do without application consistent !rst, and then ship them to secondary site. optimization called sparse retention, to retain restore points on a per VM basis. Due to Subsequent synchronization only transmits long term CDP information on disk while this, users often have to spend signi!cant changes over the WAN thereby conserving minimizing target storage utilization. As amount of time in bringing up applications bandwidth utilization even for the !rst copy. time progresses, the application consistency at the time of the actual failover, thus bookmarks are maintained at less frequent signi!cantly increasing the recovery times. Instantaneous Application intervals. For example, a sparse retention policy Consistent and Granular Recovery could be speci!ed as: retain all changes for the last three days, one recovery point per hour for Blazing Fast Backups with NO Application consistency is enforced at Backup Windows four days beyond that, and one recovery point scheduled intervals as part of the protection per day for older data. This gives the ability to InMage vContinuum tracks data changes policy. For Windows production recover to application consistent points further right from memory, eliminating any backup VMs this is achieved through VSS integration back in time without consuming signi!cantly or replication I/O impact on production for applications such as MS Exchange, MS more target storage beyond the !rst week. VMs. The low impact data tap then transmits SQL, SharePoint and Fileservers. For vContinuum also features thin provisioning the changes in real-time to the server. production VMs and applications like MySQL and compression support, to further reduce With this approach, backup windows are and Oracle, application native mechanisms disk capacity requirements for backup. entirely eliminated on production VMs. The are supported. The target agent maintains the vContinuum repository VM continuously retention data which contains CDP journal Recovery Points backs up these changes, allowing for the and application consistency bookmarks. This ability to restore protected virtual machines allows for any point-in-time recovery in the to any point in time. The solution can scale retention window, in addition to application to handle large deployments seamlessly. consistent points. Sparse retention provides long term data retention for disk backup, Replication with Near Zero Data by keeping just the application consistency Figure 2. Application consistent recovery points avail- Loss and Push Button Failover bookmarks at sparse intervals as time able with sparse retention while minimizing target storage requirements. progresses. This signi!cantly minimizes target InMage vContinuum provides one-to-many storage requirements, while providing all data protection capabilities to enable local the bene!ts of CDP based disk backup. Once Scalable Architecture and backup and remote replication simultaneously the protection policy is created it can be Seamless Upgrade to Protect and continuously. The vContinuum server monitored and managed from the server GUI. Physical Servers o#oads compression, encryption, WAN acceleration, bandwidth management, The server GUI can be used to perform non- InMage vContinuum is based on a host- centralized monitoring and other tasks disruptive operational recovery through o#oad architecture due to which the impact from the production VMs. The vContinuum use of virtual or physical snapshots that are on production VMs is extremely low. The wizard also provides a simple mechanism application consistent. Snapshots can be compute intensive tasks such as compression to perform DR tests through push-button created to any point-in-time in the speci!ed and WAN acceleration are handled by the failover and failback operations. Production retention window, without a"ecting on- vContinuum server. This model can scale very VMs can be recovered to the latest available going replication. Virtual snapshots can easily to accommodate increased production data with near zero data loss, or even the be created instantaneously, and do not VMs or storage capacities by pointing last application consistent point to ensure consume any additional target storage. them to an existing vContinuum server or extremely low recovery times. Further, They can even be leveraged to o"-load provisioning additional ones as required. vContinuum also automates retargeting the reporting, testing and development from a Since replication takes place at the guest VM recovered VMs to DR networking scheme. production VM to the target. Any changes level, it can accommodate any underlying This can enable DR testing of replicated VMs made are stored as temporary !les that hardware, storage architecture (DAS, SAN, without disruption to live production VMs. are deleted once the virtual snapshot is NAS) and storage technology (SCSI, iSCSI, destroyed. Snapshots provide an easy and FC). This provides users with the maximum The wizard based GUI provides a quick and e"ective way to perform granular operational $exibility in planning and provisioning easy way to create protection policies. As part recovery at !le and disk (VMDK) level. a cost-e"ective secondary infrastructure of this process the wizard auto-provisions for backup or replication. In addition, failover VMs, performs push installation of InMage vContinuum can be seamlessly all required software elements, and creates Sparse Retention and Target Storage Capacity Optimization upgraded to protect, manage and recover all required protection and application physical servers, thus providing a single consistency policies. The wizard supports Traditional backup products rely on post consistent approach to backup and replicate granular protection for selective VMs, backup deduplication to minimize data mixed virtual and physical environments.

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Copyright 2010, InMage Systems, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This document is provided for information purposes only, and the contents hereof are subject to change without notice. InMage, Scout, vContinuum and their respective logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of InMage Systems, Inc. All other company and product names contained herein are trademarks of the respected holders.